January 25, 2017

Miniature in the Mail #55: "Bridge the Gap"

"Bridge the Gap," 4x6in., oil on masonite

This weirdly vulvic scene, a day after the tyrant in the White House and his Boy Scouts signed an executive order for an anti-abortion global gag rule (can you even imagine a group of women coming together to do the comparable, affecting men's reproductive choices?), and two days after millions marched across the world to defend women's rights, actually comes more banally from a recent trip to Joshua Tree National Park.

It's the view through a crevice and, in some sense, where it all started for me. He, he.

Before taking this art thing as seriously as I do now, I was a translator, and before that a high school teacher, and before that a computer programmer, and before that a plasterer, etc. All this philandering because nothing really matched. Eventually, miserable, I thought deeply about what I enjoyed most when I was young and had the freedom to go with my gut, and voila, art!

An exercise in art class—it must have been grade 9 or 10—that for some reason stuck involved arranging a heap of stones into a pleasing composition and sketching it in greys. I remember thinking, hmm, hard and sometimes frustrating getting the tones and details right, but wonderfully gratifying. Amazing what a dirty stick of charcoal can accomplish.